By continuing to browse this web site you are certifying your agreement to its terms of use; please read them if you have not done so already.

COMES NATURALLY #71 (May 29, 1998)
(c) David Steinberg

THE PROUD SEXUAL ROOTS OF SAN FRANCISCO

A SEX-HISTORICAL TOUR

Playboy senior editor James Petersen came to San Francisco a few weekends
ago, in the role of tour guide. Petersen gave up his long-standing post
as the Playboy Advisor to focus on writing a "History of the Sexual
Revolution" that has been appearing in Playboy for the past two years.
Now he is on the road, promoting his series with city bus tours of sites
where important events of sexual history have occurred. The San Francisco
tour follows on the heels of similar excursions to sex-historical sites in
New York and Washington, D.C., with a tour of Los Angeles due this fall.
"This is where 25 years as the Playboy Advisor has gotten me," Petersen
laughs, "to leading guided bus tours."

The local tour, an unabashed (and successful) attempt to garner press
attention, provided an opportunity for Petersen to expound on the vagaries
of San Francisco's long and colorful sexual history, tell a number of
entertaining and eye-opening stories, and offer what proved to be a
thoughtful overview of the various ways that sex has been expressed,
regulated, controlled, confined, and emancipated over the past 100 or 150
years.

Petersen is a veritable fount of historical detail, juicy anecdotes, and
social philosophy. "Each article [covering one decade from 1900 to the
present] takes me about three months to prepare," he says. "I load up
four shopping bags full of books, spend about six weeks reading, two weeks
writing, and another month rewriting and editing."

The San Francisco tour paid passing homage to such local sex monuments as
The Great American Music Hall (once a dance hall and brothel), the
O'Farrell Theater (birthplace of high-budget sexual entertainment), the
exclusive Bohemian and Olympia men's clubs, the Saint Francis Hotel (site
of the 1921 Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal), the notorious Barbary Coast
red-light district, North Beach (the birthplace of topless dancing), the
Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, the Castro District's Twin Peaks Bar
(first gay bar with indiscreet picture windows), the Libertarian Bookstore
(where Californians Against Censorship Together long held their meetings),
the home of COYOTE (the nation's foremost prostitute rights organization),
and such centers of state-enforced sex regulation as the U.S. Customs
Building and San Francisco City Hall.

On this particular tour, Petersen's historical patter provides
entertaining and informative narrative as the bus makes its way from
neighborhood to neighborhood with its small entourage of the sexually and
historically curious souls -- press people plus a smattering of civilians.
One young couple, who has won free tour tickets on a local radio station,
aren't quite sure what they are in for, but by the end of the two hours
they are quite glad for the experience.

We learn that the baroquely decorated Great American Music Hall, formerly
The Music Box, has a long history as a dance hall and brothel owned by
renowned stripper and fan dancer, Sally Rand. Rand, who performed her
dances regularly at The Music Box, also performed nude with the whole
world watching the celebrated 1939 Pacific Exhibition and World's Fair.

Petersen points across downtown Union Square to what was once the Barbary
Coast sex district -- wall-to-wall brothels in the Gold Rush days, when
San Francisco men outnumbered women fifty-to-one and the one major city
west of St. Louis was indeed a wild and woolly place. Establishments with
names like the Hotel Nymphia sported scantily-clad women sitting in every
window, enticing men from the streets to join them. Eventually, Petersen
explains, the respectable people of San Francisco closed the Barbary Coast
down, but they needed a wave of moral hysteria to do it. The red-light
abatement campaign that swept the nation shortly after the turn of the
century came in the wake of sensationalized reports of a basically
non-existent White Slave Trade corrupting innocent young girls into
prostitution. The San Francisco reformers triumphantly renamed the most
notorious street of brothels virginal Maiden Lane, now famous for its
elegant and impeccably reputable restaurants and boutiques.

Across Union Square from the site of the old Barbary Coast sits the nowelegant
Saint Francis Hotel, site of the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal of
1921. It seems that Arbuckle, in San Francisco to film a movie, enjoyed
filling his room with ladies of the night when not on set. After one of
his debauches, a young woman suspiciously died. Arbuckle was accused of
killing her. He was tried three times, producing two hung juries before
he was finally acquitted. (The final jury went so far as to apologize to
Arbuckle for his inconvenience.) Although legally vindicated, Arbuckle's
acting career was destroyed by the scandal and the film industry was so
embarrassed that it wrote a code of moral behavior for actors that was
written into film contract for years thereafter. This practice of
legislating what show people did with their private time led to the
church-dominated Legion of Decency which managed to severely restrict
sexual activity shown in films for decades, and lives on today in the
motion picture rating system.

Nationally, the legislative outcome of the White Slave Trade scare was the
Mann Act of 1910, the first Federal attempt to regulate consenting sexual
behavior among adults. The Mann Act made it illegal to cross state lines
for extramarital sexual purposes, no matter how consensual the sex might
be. A couple from San Francisco, trysting in Reno, for example, were
subject to arrest unless they were married. Indeed, Petersen explains,
the FBI was first organized for the purpose of enforcing the provisions of
the Mann Act. "So you see," he notes with a wry smile, "it was the
regulation of sex that gave us J. Edgar Hoover."

While sex has often had its effects on broader social history, Petersen
observes, so have broader social issues impacted sexual attitudes and
practices. When immigrants began flooding into the United States around
1910, for example, they brought with them attitudes about sex far more
liberal than those of the starchy Americans. The country was in an
uproar. Expanding American industry needed the cheap labor that
immigrants provided, but the good patricians were scared to death of being
overrun by foreigners -- particularly dark-skinned foreigners -- and their
distinctly foreign ideas. "One of the most frightening foreign ideas,"
says Petersen, "was non-procreative sex."

The battle against foreign influence was virulent and widespread.
Inflammatory racial and ethnic stereotypes were trumpeted everywhere. But
when World War I put millions of American young men in Europe, far from
their wives and girlfriends, the battle against foreign ideas -- at least
foreign sexual ideas -- was lost forever. "How ya gonna keep 'em down on
the farm once they've seen Paree?" popular culture asked. Indeed, once
these hordes of sex-deprived neophytes were introduced to the wonders of
"French sex," there was no way they were going to give up their newly
discovered pleasures at home, no matter how many states had laws defining
oral sex as an act against nature. War had enlarged the American sexual
experience once and for all.

The sexual tour bus stops at City Lights Books in North Beach. It was City
Lights poet and visionary Lawrence Ferlinghetti who published "Howl," the
long celebrated poem of his good friend Allen Ginsberg in 1957. "Howl"
was prosecuted as obscene shortly after it was published (as was Lenore
Kandel's beautiful little book of sacramental odes to sex, "The Love
Book"), but in fine San Francisco tradition, both Ginsberg and Kandel were
exonerated.

We get out to stretch our legs and take a short walking tour through North
Beach, home of the Beat revolution against social conformity in general,
and sexually hypocrisy in particular. Outside the Condor Bar, a stone's
throw from City Lights, Petersen points out the bronze plaque that proudly
commemorates the spot where Carol Doda kicked off the nation's topless
dance craze in 1958, expanding to full on-stage nudity in 1959.

"San Francisco has always had sex as a visible part of the landscape,"
Petersen admires. "San Francisco has always protected sexual diversity
and made it visible," whether by hosting the Barbary Coast of the 19th
century, or more recently by being home to the Summer of Love, by serving
as a "Mecca" for gays and lesbians tired of being secretive about their
sexual orientation, or by continuing as the unparalleled current capitol
of sexual exploration, erotic publishing, and freely accessible sex
information and tools.

As the bus descends from the heights of Twin Peaks, Petersen points
towards Good Vibrations, San Francisco's distinctively woman-friendly sex
store, where the idea that women as well as men should be entitled to
unabashedly pursue sex for pleasure was given both a voice and an outlet
twenty years ago by founder Joani Blank. Joani Blank and her philosophy
of open and unfettered celebration of women's sexual prerogatives, says
Petersen, has validated women's pursuit of sexual pleasure on their own
terms as being as important as any other aspect of feminism. "Who,"
Petersen wonders aloud, "do you think has done more for women, overall --
Gloria Steinem or Joani Blank?" The answer, he claims, "would have to be
Joani Blank."

"The world," Petersen summarizes, "is divided into two camps: Those who
think that sex controls you, and those who think that you can control sex.
People who think that sex controls you have to be afraid of sex and seek
to regulate it at any cost. But those who think that you can control sex
are free to welcome and enjoy sex fully."

RECLAIMING A HERITAGE OF SEXUAL RESISTANCE

Driving around San Francisco, listening to Petersen's tales, placing
current sexual dilemmas into historical context, is a surprisingly
cathartic experience. In the same way that the historical place of women
and African Americans has been rendered largely invisible by white male
historians, so has the appreciation of sex as a significant historical
force been undermined by antisexuals who understand the societal
importance of sex only when it is a threat to health, safety, or the
rational control of human behavior.

Understanding changing sexual fashions and attitudes over time -- seeing
how sexual issues have influenced and been influenced by other major
social and political questions throughout history -- is, in part, a way of
reclaiming a suppressed cultural heritage, not unlike the way that African
Americans, or women, or Jews, or Native Americans, have been enriched and
validated by connecting with their own unacknowledged cultural and
historical traditions.

The sexual issues that are such an important social and political
battleground in these times are issues that others have faced before us.
Resistance to oppressive sexual prohibitions and constraints was not
invented in the 1960's. The struggle to pursue and legitimatize sexual
joy and pleasure in the face of a culture that tries to relegate sexual
pleasure and diversity to social and historical fringes has been raging
for hundreds of years. So-called sexual "deviance" has a history as
colorful, varied, and profound as the history of resistance to slavery, or
the social movements of women struggling for gender equality. As far back
as Colonial America -- as well as in earlier European societies -- there
has always been a well-developed underground supporting sexual expression
outside the narrow confines of antisexual propriety. And the interface
between that underculture and the attempts of church and state to suppress
and control it has shaped not only sexual expression itself, but all other
social, political, and economic issues as well.

Once sexual issues are placed in proper historical context, sex itself
gains a degree of social and political legitimacy and respect that is
otherwise easily lost. If sexual deviance has always existed as an
important social phenomenon, it becomes impossible, for example, to
dismiss contemporary sexual experimentation as the mere diddling of
irresponsible hedonists, or to write off social upheavals like the sexual
blossoming of the 60s and 70s as incidental psychedelic wrinkles on an
otherwise bland and homogeneous social landscape.

As long as religiously and state-mandated sexual regulation denies the
sexual reality of a major proportion of men and women, organized sexual
"deviance" is here to stay, with roots as deeply embedded in this
patriotic American soil as those of any blue-blooded Son or Daughter of
the American Revolution.

Now, let's see, where's that petition to have September 23, the birthday
of Victoria Woodhull -- outspoken suffragist, free-love advocate, sometime
prostitute, and the first woman to run for President of the United States
-- declared a national holiday?

[This column was originally published in Spectator Magazine (see www.spectator.net). If you would like to receive Comes Naturally columns, and other writing by
David Steinberg, regularly via email, send your name and email address to David
at eronat@aol.com. Columns are sent as
blind carbon copies, meaning that no one will have access to your name or email
address.]